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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers determine the size of a file??? Post 45748 by Perderabo on Tuesday 30th of December 2003 02:19:37 PM
Old 12-30-2003
Things are not quite this simple. There are two different concepts of size here.

The 1558 does mean that a program can read 1558 bytes from this files. An attempt to read byte 1559 will fail with an EOF being returned. This is one concept of size.

But I think that Alan is actually interested in the second concept which is how much disk space is consumed by the file. The answer is that 8 * 512 = 4096 bytes of disk space is being using by this file. And that 8 came from the first column of the "ls" listing.

So if a program adds a byte to the file, making that 1558 to be a 1559, no additional disk space is needed.

This difference becomes very important because unix supports sparce files. If Alan wrote a program that seeks to byte 1,999,999,999 and writes a single byte, he will see something like this:
16 -rwx------ 1 root sys 2000000000 Dec 30 14:06 sparsefile

(Hmmmm... I would have predicted 8. Apparently a full block was allocated instead of a fragment. This was on HP-UX 11.00 on a vxfs filesystem.)

Database programs like Oracle will do this so it happens more often than you may think.

Here is my program in case you'd like to try it...
Code:
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>

main()
{
        int fd;
        char byte=0;
        fd=open("sparsefile", O_CREAT|O_RDRW, 0700);
        lseek(fd, 1999999999, SEEK_SET);
        write(fd, &byte, 1);
        close(fd);
        exit(0);
}

 

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RK(4)							     Kernel Interfaces Manual							     RK(4)

NAME
rk - RK-11/RK05 disk SYNOPSIS
/sys/conf/SYSTEM: NRK rk_drives # RK05 /etc/dtab: #Name Unit# Addr Vector Br Handler(s) # Comments rk ? 177400 220 5 rkintr # rk05 major device number(s): raw: 15 block: 6 minor device encoding: specifies drive: <rk_drive> DESCRIPTION
Minor device numbers are drive numbers on one controller. The standard device names begin with ``rk'' followed by the drive number and then the letter "h". The character ? stands here for a drive number in the range 0-7. The block files access the disk via the system's normal buffering mechanism and may be read and written without regard to physical disk records. There is also a `raw' interface which provides for direct transmission between the disk and the user's read or write buffer. A single read or write call results in exactly one I/O operation and therefore raw I/O is considerably more efficient when many words are transmitted. The names of the raw files conventionally begin with an extra `r.' In raw I/O the buffer must begin on a word (even) boundary, and counts should be a multiple of 512 bytes (a disk sector). Likewise seek calls should specify a multiple of 512 bytes. DISK SUPPORT
The rk driver does not support pseudo-disks (partitions). Each file rk?h refers to the entire drive as a single sequentially addressed file. Each drive has 4872 512-byte blocks. It's not clear what one would do with one of these drives if one had one ... FILES
/dev/rk[0-7]h block files /dev/rrk[0-7]h raw files /dev/MAKEDEV script to create special files /dev/MAKEDEV.local script to localize special files SEE ALSO
hk(4), ra(4), ram(4), rl(4), rp(4), rx(4), si(4), xp(4), dtab(5), autoconfig(8) DIAGNOSTICS
rk%d: hard error sn%d er=%b ds=%b. An unrecoverable error occurred during transfer of the specified sector of the specified disk. The contents of the two error registers are also printed in octal and symbolically with bits decoded. The error was either unrecoverable, or a large number of retry attempts could not recover the error. rk%d: write locked. The write protect switch was set on the drive when a write was attempted. The write operation is not recoverable. BUGS
In raw I/O read and write(2) truncate file offsets to 512-byte block boundaries, and write scribbles on the tail of incomplete blocks. Thus, in programs that are likely to access raw devices, read, write and lseek(2) should always deal in 512-byte multiples. DEC-standard error logging should be supported. A program to analyze the logged error information (even in its present reduced form) is needed. 3rd Berkeley Distribution August 20, 1987 RK(4)
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